In a Queer Voice: Journeys of Resilience from Adolescence to Adulthood

Foreword

Foreword Carol Gilligan Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one. —John Berger A voice that sounds different may be called just that—a different voice. Or it may be called odd, or deviant, or queer. The implication is that there is a right way to speak and that this different voice is somehow not right. At the time I wrote In a Different Voice, women, insofar as they differed from men, were considered to be either less or more than human. Like children, they were seen as not fully developed, or they were regarded as saints. Listening to women at that time, I heard the differences that led Freud to describe women as having “less sense of justice than men” (Freud [1925] 1961, 257–258) and others to question whether women in fact had a sense of self. But I questioned the interpretation. The categories of psychological theory, the conception of self, relationships, and morality, had been framed by listening to men. What could be learned about human experience by listening to women? My ear had been caught by two things: a silence among men and an absence of resonance when women said what they really felt and thought. “Would you like to know what I think? Or would you like to know what I really think?” a woman asked me one day early on in my research. I had asked her to respond to one of the dilemmas psychologists use to assess moral development. As her question implied, she had learned to think about morality in a way that differed from how she really thought. But as she also revealed, she knew how she really thought as well as how she was supposed to think. This posed a challenge to the methods of psychological research. What are the conditions in which people will say or even know what they viii Foreword really think and feel? What voices are we listening to, and how do we hear them? The inclusion of women’s voices in what had been called the human conversation changed the voice of the conversation by giving voice to aspects of human experience that had been for the most part unspoken or unseen. It shifted the paradigm, changing the categories that shape how we listen and what we see. The voice once heard as deficient and associated with women— a voice that joins reason with emotion and self with relationships—turned out to be a human voice. The splitting of self from relationships and thought from emotion once taken as markers of development turned out to be manifestations of injury or trauma. In his recent book The Age of Empathy, the primatologist Frans de Waal calls for “a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature” (2009, 7). As researchers across the human sciences are discovering, we had been telling false stories about ourselves. In a Queer Voice joins the series of books that have set out to correct our perception of ourselves by giving voice to those among us who have been driven into silence. I have known Michael Sadowski since he enrolled in my seminar on the Listening Guide method with a particular interest in listening to the voices of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth. Within a society infected by homophobia, their voices were heard as queer. Listening to their ways of speaking about themselves and their experiences of being in the world, Sadowski found that their voices queer the categories of sexuality and gender that presume heterosexuality. The analogy to In a Different Voice implied by his title captures this shift in interpretation. Like the different voice that joins reason with emotion and self with relationships, the queer voice he asks us to listen to spurs a reconsideration of what it means to be human. In Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, Kenji Yoshino (2006), writing as a poet and a legal scholar, describes the many ways he felt called on to cover his gay identity and the struggles he faced in seeking authenticity in his personal and professional life. If he could not reveal who he knew himself to be, how could he be loved? And what was the meaning of acceptance? The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott and others have written about the costs of assuming a false self. To Yoshino, the demand to cover is the civil rights issue of our time. At a telling moment in his book, he describes the...